The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  What if she got pregnant? she asked him. He made it plain she’d be on her own.

  (The question, “Did Didion ever get pregnant in New York?”—relevant because abortion became a central subject in her first three novels—her friends politely chose not to answer.)

  She imagined being done with Parmentel, saying to him from now on they’d just be buddies.

  What if the Queens tunnel started to crack one day while she was in it? What if a gas main exploded beneath her feet?

  She thought of men she suspected of wanting her, men who liked her. Greg Dunne. They met for lunch occasionally, talked about writing. She enjoyed the affected way he greeted her with “Howdy,” more like a Texan than an Eastern Irish Catholic (in fact, he said “Howdy” because he’d been a stutterer as a boy and still tripped on the word hello). They were comfortable together. They had a fine time, even if he had voted for JFK. One afternoon, he confessed to her that he loved poking around mailboxes in brownstone lobbies to discover who lived where. Serendipitously, he had located Tammy Grimes and Henry Fonda. She joined him for a round of snooping. They laughed a lot, and he told her he looked forward to their next lunch.

  She wasn’t eating much these days. Her stomach was usually upset. She had a yeast infection and often ran a fever. Sometimes she’d stare at a plate of pasta and it would look like a nest of snakes.

  Nicky Haslam, an interior designer hired by Vogue’s Art Department, said that, in the office, Didion “spent most of every morning in tears following a disastrous evening, but by afternoon had put on lipstick and Fleurs de Rocaille, transforming herself into the most desirable, delicious, funny, and perceptive dinner date.”

  * * *

  On visits to her parents in Sacramento, she’d sit in her old bedroom, remembering fireworks in the summer skies during the state fair; the marbled columns in old San Francisco hotels; her mother’s warning, “All the fruit’s going,” during a flood when Didion was a girl; drinking beer or vodka and orange juice in the desert as a teenager, smelling of chlorine, sweat, and Lava soap, snuggling into a boy’s shirt stiff with dirt and starch. She couldn’t stand to stay in Sacramento, but she didn’t want to return to New York. Her father told her it was okay to go back. He’d remind her she had to sit at the table to play. Years later, her mother told her she’d acted so listless on these visits, Eduene feared she was dying and just didn’t want to tell them.

  Always, it seemed, she got a run in her stockings on the flights back east. Her neck would hurt from sleeping against the window. She feared the landing gear wouldn’t work. Invariably, New York was cold upon arrival, but then within days the heat would top ninety and people would pull ice cubes from tumblers of bourbon and run them along their arms.

  One day, she found herself standing in the rain near Grand Central Terminal, trying to flag a taxi. It seemed she’d been standing there for hours without realizing it. A man came up and spoke to her. She started to cry. She feared she would never move from that spot.

  Another day, she had thrown up after lunch. Once she got home, she emptied an ice tray into her bed. Maybe she could freeze the damn migraine.

  3

  “One incident I remember was very shocking to me,” Parmentel recalled. “I said [to Joan], ‘You ought to do a piece on the grand old hotels. She did and sent it to, I think, American Heritage. They sent it back, and she cried and cried and cried. I couldn’t believe how hard she was taking it. She said this made her feel like when she hadn’t been admitted to Stanford. I felt so bad for her that I sent the piece to somebody I’d met at Esquire and said, ‘For Christ’s sake, publish this thing—it’s breaking her heart.’ And they did.”

  A little later, during the excitement surrounding the founding of The New York Review of Books, he recommended Didion to Jason Epstein. “What do I want with some little nobody who writes for Buckley?” Epstein responded.

  Throughout this period, to cheer her up (and perhaps to take some pressure off himself), Parmentel urged her to take short trips, eat a little, put on weight, get a bit of color into her skin. In the fall of 1962, she flew to California to vote in the Republican primary for a man named Joe Shell who was running against Richard Nixon. Nixon was too liberal for her. “Those Okies she grew up with were getting educated and taking over, and she was contemptuous of them,” Parmentel said.

  This act of pioneer citizenship gave her a glow, but soon it was gone. Off and on, she’d figured things were stalled with Parmentel, and the job at Vogue had “tapped into a certain vein of discontent,” she said, “a definite sense that I was marking time, not doing what I thought I should be doing, which was finishing a novel that then existed only in pieces Scotch-taped to the walls of my … apartment.”

  Could she start over? Do something different?

  Despite her ambition and drive, she had refused to believe she was locked into the consequences of her decisions. Like a gambler, she liked to keep her options open. Another way of saying this, she realized, was that she didn’t want to grow up.

  When she’d first got to New York, she had taken a correspondence course through the University of California Extension on shopping-center theory, a gesture in the direction of staying flexible—staying young—and having it all. She wanted to write fiction, but she was not deluded into thinking literature would pay the bills; if she could collect the capital and develop a series of regional centers in the West, lining up a department store as a mall’s major tenant, or maybe even a neighborhood center or two with a supermarket chain as the anchor, she could fund her writing habit—she was her father’s daughter! (As she dreamed of this, she recalled summer days in California with her brother, Jim, building model villages with matchboxes along the banks of irrigation ditches, planning the tiny cities’ growth, watching them crumble into the ravines.) In her early days at Vogue, she’d sit on Irving Penn’s studio floor reading The Community Builder’s Handbook. Her colleagues didn’t see the beauty of her plan—all those tasteless prefab buildings (beloved of the West, with so much space to fill). But she understood the value of malls: They were the same everywhere, “equalizers” in the “sedation of anxiety.” The problem with her plan was not tastelessness or the difficulty of raising the scratch. A few months in New York taught her there were challenges unaccounted for by theory: government regulations, unions, the mob.

  So she sought another direction. “I was bored … and I was having trouble with the novel … and I was tired of living this way, and so I decided to become an oceanographer,” she recalled. She had always been fascinated by marine geography and “how deep things are.” “So I went out to Scripps Institute to try to find out how to implement this and, of course, I learned that I was so lacking in basic science that I would have to go back to the seventh grade and start over.”

  Going back to seventh grade would certainly be a way of not growing up, but it was impractical. What she’d been avoiding was this: The desire to remain a child, untouched by consequences, was the real problem, a difficulty none of her New York friends seemed willing to face. It turned out that her body was ahead of her mind in grasping at least one practical course of action.

  She tacked another baby-food ad to her wall.

  * * *

  On the “bad afternoon” when her break from Parmentel became official, she understood the terror of adult life: It was the need to make promises against an “amoral vacuum.” “Making anything at all matter has never been easy,” she wrote years later, recalling that day.

  “Goodbye to All That” suggests she made the break. Dan Wakefield remembered it differently. “Noel came over to my place the day he convinced her he was never going to get married and have children,” he told me.

  In any case, she hoped she and Noel could stay friends. He was certainly a boon to her professionally.

  She didn’t comprehend how he could just stand there, listening to her so unmoved. He told her a lot had happened to him before he knew her, and “nothing much touched him anymore.” Sh
e said she never wanted to get the way he was. “Nobody wants to,” he said. “But you will.”

  4

  Greg Dunne’s apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street, in a block of flats built in the late 1930s, faced south and overlooked an identical building across the street managed by the same property owner. From his window he could see into an apartment just like his, with a decorative fireplace and the same number of light fixtures (four bulbs in the living room, three in the bedroom, and two in the kitchen). In Vegas (1974), a book Dunne described as a “memoir” as well as a “fiction which recalls a time … real and imagined,” he said that while living in this apartment he discovered he had a “capacity for voyeurism” similar to a “virus lodged in [his] upper respiratory system.” (In a letter to journalist Jane Howard, he admitted the phrase “real and imagined” was a ruse, designed to hide the book’s autobiographical core.)

  He had just broken up with a Catholic girl, who always said the Act of Contrition after sex in case she died in her sleep, when he realized what an unobstructed view he had into the apartment across the street and how bountiful that view could be. The tenant was a “large, good-looking woman of perhaps thirty, very tall, nearly six feet, long blond hair, well-proportioned figure,” he wrote. Every afternoon, she opened her window, “turned the stereo on loud, made herself a drink, took off her clothes and then stark-naked, using her drink as a baton, began to conduct Mozart’s Concerto #5 in A-Major.”

  She took his mind off Time. She changed his after-work routine. Now, instead of popping into funeral homes on the East Side “to see if anyone famous had died” or loitering around brownstone mailboxes, he rushed right home to his window: “She required total concentration.”

  Possibly in Vegas he exaggerated his snooping habits, as befits (one supposes) a fictionalized memoir, but in interviews Didion confirmed his proclivities and affirmed how much she enjoyed playing along with him (Invisible Scarlet O’Neil).

  His love of sharing adventures with her would reach its peak over twenty years later in Los Angeles when, researching locations for the movie True Confessions, based on his novel, he visited the L.A. morgue at two in the morning with two homicide cops. “There must have been five hundred bodies in there,” he said. “They’re stacked in the cold room on Tiffany blue stretchers—you know, the light blue color of Tiffany boxes—five stretchers to a tier. The smell isn’t too bad, but it’s a little high, so you smoke a cigar. The whole thing just blew me away. It just blew my mind. I came home and woke Joan up and said, ‘Babe, this is something you’ve got to see.’”

  * * *

  In Vegas, Dunne laid out a scene in which he told Didion about the woman in the apartment across the street. The thing was, he hadn’t seen her in a while and he worried about her. Weeks ago now, she’d left all her lights on (four in the living room, three in the bedroom, two in the kitchen) and they were beginning to sizzle out. What if something had happened to her? Perhaps one of those randy fellows he’d spied in her bed …

  Didion urged him to tell the building’s super. He waffled. How could he do that without revealing his addiction to watching? Didion prodded him: Maybe she overdosed. On what? Dunne asked.

  “Don’t be obtuse,” Didion said.

  Shamed, Dunne went to the super. It turned out that the woman had eloped.

  But that’s not the point of the story. The point is, Didion pressured Dunne to confide in the super one morning in his apartment. She’d come home with him the night before. Together, they “sat and stared” at the missing woman’s window, “neither of us saying a word,” Dunne wrote, “until exhaustion finally took us to bed with each other for the first time.”

  * * *

  John Gregory Dunne, born May 25, 1932 in West Hartford, Connecticut, always attributed his writing abilities (and his reporter’s voyeuristic tics) to his childhood stutter. “I listened to the way people talked, becoming in the process a rather good mimic, and grew so precociously observant that my mother once complained that I never missed a twitch or a droopy eyelid or the crooked seam of a stocking,” he wrote. He also learned to express himself well on paper, fearful that if he was called upon to recite, the nuns in St. Joseph’s Cathedral School would respond to his stammers with raps of the ruler. “The joke … was that the nuns would hit you until you bled and then hit you for bleeding,” he said.

  He had been named after Archbishop John Gregory Murray of St. Paul, Minnesota, who had married his parents, but the nuns—Sister Theodosius, Sister Barnabus, Sister Marie de Nice—witnessed more devilry than angelic behavior from him.

  The fifth of six siblings (“we divided into the Four Oldest and the Two Youngest”), he carried, along with the rest of his family, “a full cargo of ethnic and religious freight,” he said. Irish Catholics in a neighborhood of wealthy Protestants, they were made to feel like outsiders. Dunne grew up quietly resentful. Every Christmas, he felt humiliated when his mother made him line up with his brothers and sisters, “their faces scrubbed and shiny, to hand out oranges and shoes to the needy,” knowing the Protestant kids (the Yanks) made little distinction between those giving and those receiving the charity. His grandfather, a potato-famine immigrant, had been a butcher, and though eventually his labor nicely positioned the family (he worked his way up in the community, from “steerage to suburbia,” Dunne said, becoming a bank president), the neighbors never let the Dunnes forget they were nouveau riche, still living in Frog Hollow, the old Irish section. Once poor, always a pauper.

  “[I was] slightly ashamed of my origins, patronizing toward the Irish still on the make,” Dunne admitted. In that time and place, class was everything. “Don’t get mad, get even”: On public occasions, the community’s leaders liked to repeat this key to success. For Dunne, the motto was “Get mad and get even.”

  Didion always thought West Hartford was not so different from Sacramento, which is why she and John got along so well.

  “Poppa,” Dunne called his grandfather. “[H]e had an enormous influence on my brother and me,” Dominick Dunne said. “It was as if he spotted us for the writers we would one day be. He didn’t go to school past the age of fourteen, but literature was an obsession with him. He was never without a book, and he read voraciously. Early on, he taught John and me the excitement of reading. On Friday nights we would often stay over at his house and he would read the classics or poetry to us and give us each a fifty-cent piece for listening.”

  Dunne’s father became a heart surgeon. The family moved into a large house on Albany Avenue with a six-car garage. They hired “help”—not the “coloreds” the Yanks employed, but “wayward” Catholic girls from the House of the Good Shepherd. These girls worked until someone got them pregnant—“as my mother was the dispenser of Kotex, no missed period went unnoticed,” Dunne wrote.

  With six kids in the house, family life was full of “sniper fire.” Like the nuns at school, the elder Dunne was a “quick man with a strap” and John’s older brother Dominick—“Nick,” everyone called him—caught the worst of the old man’s rage. Nick preferred staging puppet shows to playing sports or hunting. He liked Mrs. Godfrey’s dance classes. His father would call him a “Sissy” and beat him with a wooden coat hanger.

  When the old man turned on John, John made it a point not to cry. He’d giggle and his younger brother, Stephen, afraid of pushing their father to his limit, “would do my crying for me,” Dunne recalled. This seemed to be Stephen’s role in the family. His mother used to say he “played life on the dark keys.”

  Sometimes he’d ask Dunne if he ever felt depressed. Sure, Dunne said. The brothers agreed that Heath bars, Oreos, and a day in bed were the best cures for the “jits.”

  “Greg,” John’s classmates called him at school because there were so many Johns. Or “Googs”—an early nickname, origins lost.

  When Dunne was fourteen, his father died of a ruptured aorta. He was fifty-one years old. In the morning, the boy kissed his father good-bye on his way to school, and when
he came home that day, the first thing he saw were oxygen tanks on the back porch. The family placed the body in a casket in the living room and surrounded it with candles. At night, when the mourners had filed out of the house, Dunne crept downstairs in his pajamas and stood staring at his father’s face. He waited for the fingers, wrapped in a rosary, to flinch, waited to hear a breath. “I listened for a heartbeat, as years later I would bend over my daughter’s crib and listen for her heartbeat,” he wrote.

  He was forced to mature swiftly. His training involved curbing the temper he’d inherited from his father. At the hospital, his father had fired interns and nurses in the midst of surgery if he felt they did not measure up to his standards. Already, Dunne knew he was just as exacting with people.

  When his mother found a box of condoms in his room, she feared he would become sexually misguided with no man in the house. He had bought the condoms not quite knowing what to do with them, prompted by fantasies of the Polish girls who took business courses in high school “and worked in the factories of East Hartford and who were said to fuck.”

  His mother sent him to Portsmouth Priory, an exclusive boarding school in Rhode Island. The monks were “very worldly,” he recalled. One day, one of them made him take down his pants and paddled his ass with a rubber hose because he’d played hooky. For the rest of his life, Dunne thought the fellow queer.

  He liked the “pageantry” of Mass and he liked confession—“alternately rais[ing] and lower[ing] [his] voice every Saturday when [he] slipped into the confessional, a midget basso or a midget soprano depending on the week that was.” Like his future wife, he had a theatrical temperament.

  He spent much of his time at Portsmouth Priory crafting short stories modeled after O. Henry’s urban fables. One of his efforts concerned a burglar who left a Bible wherever he stole and who spent the pilfered money on his ailing mother’s medical bills. Years of Catholic education had taught him to accept as a given the “taint on the human condition.” He filled his stories with losers, with down-and-outers.